rtainly up against it!"

"Can you beat it for irony!" said Larry, pacing the floor. "A man wants
to go straight. His pals ask him to be a crook, and are sore because
he won't be a crook. The police ask him to be a crook, and threaten him
because he doesn't want to be a crook. Some situation!"

"Some situation!" repeated Hunt. "What're you going to do?"

"Do?" Larry halted, his face set with defiant determination. "I'm going
to keep on doing exactly what I've been doing! And they can all go to
hell!"

CHAPTER X

For several days nothing seemed to be happening, though Larry had a
sense that unknown forces were gathering on distant isothermal lines
and bad weather was bearing down upon him. During these days, trying
to ignore that formless trouble, he gave himself with a most rigid
determination to his new routine--the routine which he counted on to
help him into the way of great things.

Every day he saw Maggie; sometimes he was in her company for an hour or
more. He had the natural hunger of a young man to talk to a young woman;
and, moreover, it is a severe strain for a man to be living under the
same roof with the girl he loves and not to be on terms of friendship
with her. But Maggie maintained her aloofness. She spoke only when she
was pressed into it, and her speech was usually no more than a "yes" or
a "no," or a flashing phrase of disdain.

At times Larry had the feeling that, for all her repression, Maggie
would have been glad to be more free with him. And he knew enough of
human nature not to be too disheartened by her attitude. Had he been
a nonentity to her, she would have ignored him. Her very insults were
proof that he was a positive personality with real significance in her
life. And so he counseled himself to have patience and await a thawing
or an awaking. Besides, he kept repeating to himself, there would
be small chance of effecting a conversion in this militant young
orthodoxist of cynicism until he had proved the soundness of contrary
views by his own established success.

And thus the days drifted by. But on the fifth day after his interview
with Barlow things began to happen. First of all, he noticed in a
morning paper that Red Hannigan and Jack Rosenfeldt, members of his old
outfit and suggested by Old Jimmie as participants in his proposed new
enterprise, had just been arrested by Gavegan and Casey on the charge of
alleged connection with the sale of fraudulent mining stock.

Se